Make OSX El Capitan support USB to LAN adapter
Hi everyone,
Wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Apologies for not writing for a long time, was a bit occupied!
With the recent El Capitan (OSX 10.11) update by Apple, a lot of us, including me were dissatisfied. Why? Because in their approach to security, they broke support to our peripherals. My USB to LAN adapter, a cheap LAN adapter for when I don’t have access to Wifi stopped working after the upgrade. 🙁
My adapter: Quantum QHM8106 USB LAN CARD
Apple forum discussions
And the product manufacturer, Quantum on tweeting to them and mailing their support, didn’t bother to reply at all(been a couple of months I believe). So what’s the alternative? Buying a 10 times expensive Apple product? Not at all 😀
Making it work
With some hacking and some simple research, I figured out how to make that work. So for those who are looking at the solution directly, here it is:
1- First disable SIP(System integrity protection) from your Mac. Seems scary? Nope, it isn’t harmful,
just a way for Apple to have full access of what runs on your computer(my opinion). You have an option to either disable unnecessary “protection” or go and buy an Apple adapter. Disabling it is pretty simple, and I am just repeating steps from this answer here
>> Reboot your Mac into Recovery Mode by restarting your computer and holding down Command+R until the Apple logo appears on your screen.
>> Click Utilities > Terminal.
>> In the Terminal window, type in csrutil disable and press Enter.
>> Restart your Mac.
2- Second step: Download this driver and install.
You may need to reboot after installing this.
Note: I didn’t need to install/load any kext file(Kernel extensions), maybe since I was using the adapter in the previous version. It might be that of the lot of things I tried, something made the kext file load, not sure. Leave your comments here if it doesn’t work for you, I will try to fix that on another Mac.
How I did it? Pretty simple.
I opened it up and checked out the IC name, and looked for drivers for OSX. Nothing major has changed between the previous and the current OS except the Integrity protection, so they should work.
Gladly, the IC name isn’t removed. I don’t have a magnifier :/ Try to look up the IC name, umm Realtek, too hard to read, its an 81.. hard to read further, let me google that, I got Realtek 8185 USB to LAN, seems legit.
Let me try reading that again, no it isn’t an 818.. for sure, let me try harder, it’s 8152.., oh yeah got it, 8152B, and yes, I get a page for that. But wait, how, why, there is no driver support on this page. 😐
10 more minutes of digging in the site, and I get it, success 😀
Time to tweet to Quantum 🙂
Not working still
Hey, can you explain what steps you followed and what didn’t work? Can you try to run diagnostics? One of the person with the same problem tried and it worked.
It didn’t work. You have provided uninstall folder.How is it to be installed?
Can you provide the kext file. Also how do we set the kext file.
I didn’t use any kext file, rather simply used the .pkg installer. It worked on my system last week(El Capitan) so I am not sure what’s wrong.
The uninstall folder is to be used to just unload the driver.
Hi Kunal, This didn’t work for me. I disabled SIP, and then installed the driver followed by rebooting the system. After that, when I connected the adapter, the red light on the quantum adapter just blinked once, but it didn’t work. Pls help
Same here, it is not working. Followed all steps as specified. Maybe we need to install kext file? Any help in that direction would be appreciated. @Kunal
Worked perfectly! Thanks for noting this down.
Has anyone found a solution?
Worked for me even after a clean install. Do you have the same model?
Do we use this with iPhone 6s?? Please advice!!!!!